Thursday, June 19, 2014

Latest new bird flies in

Indonesia has yielded the newest bird species known to science.   The Wakatobi Flowerpecker (Dicaeum kuehni) comes from a smaller island off Sulawesi.  It is not a "just sighted" type of discovery, as it was confused with another flowerpecker from Sulawesi proper, but it's an interesting example of biodiversity. The Wakatobi bird shows no sign of interbreeding with its smaller relative: they are separated by a strait 27km wide that the birds could cross (and presumably did at some ancient point) but do not. 

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